The Mystic Word

The life and work of Hart Crane.

In 1919, the novelist and critic Waldo Frank published “Our America,” a manifesto for a new generation of American artists. Surveying the cultural situation of the United States, on the brink of what already looked to be the American century, Frank saw “an untracked wilderness but dimly blazed by the heroic ax of Whitman.” Yet a new generation of trailblazers, he thought, was about to emerge from the complacent materialism of postwar America. Writers like Sherwood Anderson and Van Wyck Brooks—along with masters of new genres like Alfred Stieglitz and even Charlie Chaplin—promised not simply to create a modern art but to renew the spirit of the country: “In this infancy of our adventure, America is a mystic Word. We go forth all to seek America. And in the seeking we create her.”

“Our America” was an intellectual sensation, going through three editions in its first six months. None of Frank’s readers, however, rose more eagerly to his challenge than twenty-year-old Hart Crane, working behind the candy counter of a drugstore in Akron, Ohio. Crane had recently returned home to the Midwest from New York City, where he had ostensibly been studying for admission to Columbia University. In fact, he had spent most of his time cultivating a reputation as a poet in Greenwich Village literary circles, publishing his work in magazines like The Little Review (where it appeared alongside the first serialized chapters of “Ulysses”). After three years, a combination of financial pressures and a psychological tug-of-war between his bitterly divorced parents had forced him to leave the city he loved for a menial job in his father’s business, the Crane Chocolate Company.

The candy business was slow in Akron, and Crane, with plenty of time to keep up with the latest news from the avant-garde, was primed to receive Frank’s modernist call. A few years later, he wrote to Frank, enlisting in his movement of American renewal: “I am certain that a number of us at last have some kind of community of interest. And with this communion will come something better than a mere clique. . . . It is vision, and a vision alone that not only America needs, but the whole world.” Frank responded generously, giving Crane steady advice and encouragement through all the tribulations to come. When the first edition of Crane’s “Collected Poems” appeared, in 1932, the year of his death, it was Frank who wrote the introduction.

Yet as Frank looked back over the brief life and slender works of his friend and protégé, he had to admit that Crane had not succeeded in becoming the poet of the “mystic Word,” the creator of the new American myth whom “Our America” had called for. Instead, Frank believed that Crane had been significant in quite another sense, as a great American failure. Crane, he wrote, “began, naked and brave, in a cultural chaos,” but his poetry could only reflect that chaos, not master it.

Inevitably, the reader of Frank’s elegy would have been reminded of more than Crane’s work. Whatever “chaos” might be found in his poems was even more dramatically evident in his life. Crane had already become one of the emblematic figures of the Lost Generation, thanks both to his conspicuous alcoholism, which was not uncommon in Prohibition America, and to his relatively open homosexuality, which was. After he moved back to New York, in 1923, the rhythm of his life became increasingly erratic. Loathing the occasional job he took as an advertising copywriter, he generally preferred unemployment, keeping afloat with subsidies from his father and loans from friends. Yet, without the tether of a job, Crane was constantly restless: in Manhattan, he missed the peace of the country; upstate, he longed for the excitement of the city. In 1926, he moved to Cuba, where he enjoyed a miraculous burst of productivity, writing much of his long poem “The Bridge” that summer. Then it was Paris, where his heavy drinking got him arrested and thrown in jail. Finally, Crane headed to Mexico on a Guggenheim fellowship, in a last, futile attempt to regain personal and creative equilibrium. On April 27, 1932, on his way back to the United States, he jumped off the deck of the S.S. Orizaba into the waters of the Caribbean.

The interpretation of Crane’s life as a dire fable of the age has shaped his reputation ever since. Yvor Winters and Allen Tate, two of his best friends and two of the best critics of modern American poetry, saw his story primarily as a warning. For Winters, he was a noble spirit destroyed by false principles, “a saint of the wrong religion”; for Tate, his poetry had “incalculable moral value,” but mainly because “it reveals our defects in their extremity.” No wonder Crane remains a special case in the canon of American modernism, his reputation never quite as secure as that of Eliot or Stevens. Langdon Hammer, a professor of English at Yale, and one of Crane’s most intelligent advocates, has written that his poetry “must be repeatedly ‘introduced’ again, brought in, reclaimed. . . . Crane still does not have a place.”

At last, however, Crane has been given a place, the most unassailable one in American letters: a volume of his own in the Library of America. “Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters,” edited by Hammer, can be seen as a conclusion to the long debate over Crane’s stature. Indeed, the book is just the sort of tangible proof of accomplishment that might have vindicated Crane’s ambitions in the eyes of his father, C. A. Crane, a hardheaded businessman whose doubts about his son’s career were never fully dispelled. “You may live to see the name ‘Crane’ stand for something where literature is talked about,” the poet promised his father in 1924. Surely even C.A. would be content to see that name on the bookshelf alongside those of Whitman and Emerson.

Still, the question of what Hart Crane “stands for” in American literature is difficult to answer. His work resists the complacency of canonization, blazing with qualities that are the opposite of classical: precocity, obscurity, and verbal recklessness. Many twentieth-century poets were heavy drinkers, but Crane was almost unique in preferring to write while he was actually drunk. Malcolm Cowley, in “Exile’s Return,” his memoir of New York and Paris in the nineteen-twenties, recalled the way Crane would slip away from a bacchanalian party to write verse:

**{: .break one} ** Gradually he would fall silent, and a little later he disappeared. In lulls that began to interrupt the laughter, now Hart was gone, we would hear a new hubbub through the walls of his room—the phonograph playing a Cuban rumba, the typewriter clacking simultaneously; then the phonograph would run down and the typewriter stop while Hart changed the record, perhaps to a torch song, perhaps to Ravel’s “Bolero.”. . . An hour later . . . he would appear in the kitchen or on the croquet court, his face brick-red, his eyes burning, his already iron-gray hair bristling straight up from his skull. . . . In his hands would be two or three sheets of typewritten manuscript, with words crossed out and new lines scrawled in. “R-read that,” he would say. “Isn’t that the grreatest poem ever written?” **

Alcohol eventually took a severe toll on Crane’s mental and physical health. Winters remembered, “I saw Crane during the Christmas week of 1927, when he was approximately 29 years old; his hair was graying, his skin had the dull red color with reticulated grayish traceries which so often goes with advanced alcoholism, and his ears and knuckles were beginning to look a little like those of a pugilist.” But in the beginning, at least, drink helped provoke the visionary mood that Crane describes in “The Wine Menagerie”:

**{: .break one} ** Invariably when wine redeems the sight, Narrowing the mustard scansions of the eyes, A leopard ranging always in the brow Asserts a vision in the slumbering gaze. **

Many readers, during his lifetime and since, have had trouble following the associative leaps and subterranean logic of that “vision.” When Crane submitted his reverent elegy “At Melville’s Tomb”—actually one of his more straightforward poems—to the magazine Poetry, the editor, Harriet Monroe, replied, with bewilderment, “Take me for a hard-boiled unimaginative unpoetic reader, and tell me how dice can bequeath an embassy (or anything else); and how a calyx (of death’s bounty or anything else) can give back a scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph; and how, if it does, such a portent can be wound in corridors (of shells or anything else). And so on.”

The poet’s reply, which is included in the Library of America volume, has become a key document of poetic modernism. Crane admitted that he was “more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness . . . than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations.” What Monroe saw as nonsense Crane insisted was a higher kind of sense. He wrote, “The nuances of feeling and observation in a poem may well call for certain liberties which you claim the poet has no right to take. I am simply making the claim that the poet does have that authority.”

The only valid test of a poet’s authority lies, of course, in the poem itself. And in Crane’s best poems linguistic daring allows him to achieve what he called “a sharpening of reality accessible to the poet, to no such degree possible through other mediums.” This is the mood of lyrics like “Repose of Rivers” and “The Broken Tower,” which create visionary landscapes in the tradition of “Kubla Khan,” and of the hymn “To Brooklyn Bridge,” the “proem” to his national epic, “The Bridge.” Above all, it is the mood of the sequence of six love poems titled “Voyages”:

No poet since Keats had achieved this kind of elated lyricism. In fact, while Crane was a modernist by vocation, he stands more comfortably in the grand tradition of English poetry than most twentieth-century poets do. In an age of free verse, he usually wrote in iambic pentameter and often used rhyme; on the page, his poems look much more conventional than the broken lines of Williams or the somersaults of Cummings. While Crane sometimes sounds like Rimbaud, his work owes less to the French Symbolists—whom he could not read fluently—than to the amplified rhetoric of the Elizabethans, especially Christopher Marlowe. He adored “the glorious cornucopia that Tamburlaine shakes page after page,” and his own verse conveys a similar sense of confused abundance.

Yet the unusual composition of the Library of America volume seems a tacit acknowledgment that Crane’s value to posterity does not lie strictly in his poetry. Alone among the volumes of modern poets included in the series—Stevens, Frost, and Pound—Crane’s supplements his poems with a copious se-lection of letters. In part, this is simply because he did not write enough poetry to fill a large book. All of Crane’s verse, including fragments and juvenilia, comes to no more than a hundred and forty-four pages in the new edition. A selection of his published prose, mainly book reviews of no great importance, fills thirty more pages.

By far the largest part of the book is made up of Crane’s letters—four hundred and twelve of them. This is a tribute to the extraordinary appeal of Crane the letter writer, who, like Crane the poet, invites comparison to Keats. What makes both men’s letters so attractive is the guileless purity of their genius. When Keats writes, “I think I shall be among the English poets after my death,” his simplicity exonerates him from any suspicion of bragging; he is merely acknowledging the possession of powers that exhilarate him as much as his readers. Crane, likewise, presents the rare spectacle of a writer who is almost never vain or egotistical, but responds to his gifts with a mixture of joy and solemn responsibility. Writing to his father in January, 1917, when he was just seventeen years old, he ingenuously announces, “I realize more entirely every day, that I am preparing for a fine life: that I have powers, which, if correctly balanced, will enable me to mount to extraordinary latitudes.”

But the letters also draw the reader’s attention to what Crane called, in a sadly prescient line in “Passage,” “a too well known biography.” In addition to the ecstatic lover, the devoted friend, and the brilliant reader of poetry, they remind us of Crane the miserable son, unable to escape from his parents’ emotional blackmail; of Crane the mendicant, always asking for loans from rich patrons and poor friends; of Crane the drunk, regaling his correspondents with stories of arrests and brawls. This is surely not how the poet would want to be remembered. He was a committed enough modernist to believe that the work of art stands entirely apart from its creator: “I would like to establish [the poem] as free from my own personality,” he wrote. By insisting that Crane’s biography is central to an understanding of his achievement, the Library of America volume ironically reinforces the verdict of his harshest critics.

For readers like Tate and Winters, Crane’s suicide was the inevitable, artistically fitting conclusion to a deeply disordered life, and the chief symptom of that disorder was his homosexuality. In Tate’s major essay on Crane’s poetry, what was ostensibly literary criticism now appears as Freud-era homophobic code: Tate speaks of Crane’s “failure to impose his will upon experience,” his “locked-in sensibility [and] insulated egoism.” Winters, still more explicit, regards Crane’s sexuality as comparable to his alcoholism, a “weakness” that he “cultivated on principle.”

To read these critics on Crane is to sympathize all the more deeply with a poet who had to negotiate the prejudices of his closest friends as well as those of society at large. “O God that I should have to live within these American restrictions forever, where one cannot whisper a word, nor at least exchange a few words!” Crane complained in 1923, after making eye contact with a man at a concert. It was the kind of tentative encounter that appears several times in his poems, as in “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen”:

**{: .break one} ** Then I might find your eyes across an aisle, Still flickering with those prefigurations. . . . There is some way, I think, to touch Those hands of yours that count the nights Stippled with pink and green advertisements. **

Only with Emil Opffer, the lover who inspired the “Voyages” sequence, did Crane seem to find a joyful intimacy. “I have seen the Word made Flesh,” he told Frank after meeting Opffer, in 1924. “I mean nothing less, and I know now that there is such a thing as indestructibility.”

Today, the homophobia that disfigured contemporary reactions to Crane is easily recognized for what it is. Yet Crane’s achievements, which place him in the second rank of modernists, still do not seem commensurate with his gifts, which were as great as any American poet’s. As Waldo Frank suggested, Crane’s failure to write more perfect and more substantial works does suggest something about his country and his age, which could not give his imagination the nourishment it needed.

The key evidence here is “The Bridge,” the long poem that Crane worked on from 1923 to 1929, about half of his adult life. Crane intended “The Bridge” as his masterpiece. Just as important, it was to be his rebuttal to “The Waste Land,” which appeared in 1922, and whose utterly convincing portrait of modern civilization in fragments seemed to put paid to the dream that the new art could regenerate American society. On many American poets, its effect was to confirm them in a cultural pessimism that sought antidotes in order, discipline, and tradition.

Crane never disputed Eliot’s genius or accomplishment; he only wanted to resist his influence. “It is such a fearful temptation to imitate him that at times I have been almost distracted,” Crane wrote to Tate. But he felt called to challenge what he saw as Eliot’s suffocating negativity, and hoped to “apply as much of [Eliot’s] erudition and technique as I can absorb and assemble toward a more positive, or (if [one] must put it so in a sceptical age) ecstatic goal. I should not think of this if a kind of rhythm and ecstasy were not (at odd moments, and rare!) a very real thing to me.”

“The Bridge” was meant to show that “ecstasy” was as valid for the modern poet as despair. “If I do succeed, such a waving of banners, such ascent of towers, such dancing etc., will never have been put down on paper!” he wrote in 1923, just after conceiving of the project. If Eliot wrote about alienation, Crane’s governing metaphor would insist on the possibility of connection. “The very idea of a bridge, of course, is a form peculiarly dependent on . . . spiritual convictions,” he wrote to Waldo Frank in 1926. “It is an act of faith besides being a communication.” He even bragged, childishly, that “The Bridge is already longer than the Waste Land,—and it’s only about half done.”

Reading “The Bridge” today, however, one cannot help but agree with the verdict of its first critics—that it is an impressive failure. At moments, it does capture what Crane called the “feelings of elation . . . like being carried forward and upward simultaneously . . . that one experiences in walking across my beloved Brooklyn Bridge.” But it varies wildly in quality, containing some of Crane’s best writing and some of his worst. His neo-Elizabethan style was never more exhilarating than in his famous description of the Brooklyn Bridge, in the concluding section, “Atlantis”:

Yet the poem also has long stretches of windy narrative about American history, focussed on bleached, school-pageant figures like Columbus, Pocahontas, and the Wright Brothers. Often, Crane’s rhetoric seems to be running on autopilot, and he can be rankly sentimental, as in his description of a prairie mother in the “Indiana” section.

More fundamentally, “The Bridge” was doomed by the self-consciousness with which Crane went about creating a new American myth. For Crane, as for contemporaries like Joseph Stella and Walker Evans (whose photographs illustrated the first edition of the poem), the Brooklyn Bridge was the perfect subject for the modern American artist—a utilitarian cathedral, whose majestic form emerges spontaneously from its mechanical function. Yet the sheer insistence of his addresses to the Bridge—the most characteristic word in the poem, and one of the most frequent, is “O”—reveal a strain. Once a poet calls his myth a myth, he prevents the reader from treating it as a reality; we use the word “myth” only for stories we ourselves cannot believe. That is why a poet cannot create myths; he can only employ and embellish the ones he has inherited. Homer could not have invented the Olympian gods, or Dante the cosmology of medieval Catholicism, and still have written as he did. By striving so effortfully to turn the Brooklyn Bridge into a religious symbol, Crane forces us to recognize that all he has really created is a vague and problematic metaphor. This failure means that “The Bridge” ends up illustrating, by a bitter irony, the central insight of “The Waste Land”: that traditional forms of belief are unavailable in the modern world.

In his urgency to justify himself and his country by producing a national epic, one might say, Crane misplaced the very quality of his work that makes it essentially American—namely, his spontaneous trust that his perceptions and experiences are as significant and authentic as anything myth or history can provide. Like Emerson and Whitman, he is certain that every great poet represents a new beginning. “I must always write from the standpoint of Adam,” he insisted. In a period obsessed with its belatedness, Crane simply refused to accept that the modern world was diminished or disenchanted, and his poetry, at its best, uses language strangely and vitally enough to vindicate its claim to ecstasy. This is the promise that survives the legend of Crane’s life and death, and even the flaws of his work, and impels us say of him what he said of Melville: “How much that man makes you love him!” ♦